Still, let’s be very clear: the study shows that you can keep off about 9 pounds long-term. So I just have to ask my brother Kevin this simple question:

Do you think taking off about 9 pounds with two years of effort is actually what you’re looking for?

Kevin D. is one of the best friends I’ve ever had, and I would take a bullet for him. Seriously. And, we both have chronic weight problems. Mine is a little better than his, but only because I bit the bullet some years ago and had a gastric bypass. I only had the gastric bypass after ten years of hunger and frustration and endless exercise and still couldn’t take more than a fraction of the weight off.

For almost ten years, I spent every fracking day thinking about how much food I was taking in, monitoring it razor-close. I also spent every fracking day (with only an occasional day off) finding ways to exercise; at my peak, I was doing about 1.5 hours of strenuous exercise every damned day. Some days, 3-4 hours.

I was able to lose some weight. But no matter how damned hard I worked, no matter how sick and tired I made myself, my body damn well would not let me get below about 220 pounds. Which, at 5’10″, is still obese. It became my singular daily obsession to at least get to 219 pounds. I never got there no matter what the hell I did.

I consulted doctors. I worked with dietitians. I made going to the gym a daily habit. I watched every calorie I took in as if life itself depended on it. I read every diet book. I even drew my poor ex-wife in on it all.

And in the end, no matter what the frack I did, I was still fat.

Ten years. Ten years of being pretty much hungry all the time and pretty much working out like a bandit every Goddamned day. Practicing martial arts and watching every damned thing that went into my mouth. It was an obsession, and on a daily basis I often thought of little else.

And I was still fracking obese.

At some point I lost patience. I especially lost patience with this old canard: “Oh Dean, you just aren’t trying hard enough, you just aren’t working hard enough, you’re just not doing it right.”

One day I shut down completely. I was being mean to my wife, I was being mean to myself, and nothing was fracking working. I was still fracking fat.

I gave up. I got some exercise when I wanted to, I tried to avoid sweets and high-calorie snacks, but I otherwise stopped paying attention to my weight. And within 1-2 years I gained about a hundred and twenty pounds. Not because I was trying to eat more. Not because I gave up all physical activity. But just because I didn’t care anymore.

A hundred+ pounds. In just a year or two. I ballooned up to over 360 pounds.

I would ask my friend Cosmic Conservative if he thinks that if he just completely gave up any pretense of fighting his weight, he’d gain 120 pounds in a year or two. I’m guessing he’d say “no, probably not.”

Because I emphasize that I was not TRYING to get fat. I just stopped trying to be not-fat.

I suspect that if my friend Cosmic wanted to, he’d have to make a major effort to gain 120 pounds. He’d have to be shoving chocolate bars and Big Macs into his mouth several times a day and using Sedan Chairs instead of walking around in his daily affairs.

There’s something clinically and scientifically WRONG going on with the chronically obese. You can’t cure it by saying “hey, be a little more disciplined and get some activity.”

There is something metabolically WRONG in most obese people. And it’s genuinely abusive to tell them they just lack discipline.

Most actual scientific data seems to support this hypothesis to me. Can you cite me even one example of a system that clearly shows that a majority of obese people who follow it take off and keep off enough weight to be considered non-obese? I’m still waiting for an example.

“When your intake and metabolism are oscillating, the effects of the exact same quantitative intake can cause your body to store fat that it won’t store on a regulated intake schedule.”

Are not relevant without any numbers or supporting evidence. I can claim that I know the acceleration of lipolytic hormones burns fat at an exponential factor compared to the spread out intake of a few meals, bu t it doesn’t make it correct.

I’ll speak in terms of systems, then:

You’ve just built a theoretical model for (a portion of) the bioenergetics of the human body. It’s interesting and well-considered, but your inputs are … theoretical. For example, if the body excretes a certain surplus of calories ingested in a sitting because of threshold, it would change the assumptions of the model, and binging the same amount of calories as eating them in small meals spread out could theoretically store less of them as fat, as one example.

Similarly, you would also ideally need to know the weights of the acceleration of fat burning hormones via fasting for long periods vs. the gradual energy intake balancing energy output. I doubt you have these weights, as no one has really come up with an accurate equation that summarizes human metabolism across a broad spectrum of humanity. (and sure, I’m familiar with equations for the use of glucose and generation of ATP, etc)

Part of this is because the nitty-grtty of metabolism is studied in a reductionist manner, part of it is because it’s hopelessly complex, and part of it is because there is tremendous variation between individuals.

As it is, in some studies, small meals more often did no better than the same amount of calories condensed in fewer meals:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/4561033a19716.html

I’m an engineer – a good one – I understand how “systems” work and the human body is just such a system. Your metabolism, regardless of whether it is fast or slow, does not adjust on a dime. When you binge and then fast, your metabolism does adjust, but the response is delayed. While psychologically you can probably adjust to any eating schedule, which probably explains Kevin’s situation, when you fast, your metabolism slows down and when you eat a large meal it speeds up. The effects of both, however last longer than your mealtime. So after “fasting” – and I use that term liberally, I don’t mean fasting in the traditional sense, think “skipping a meal” – when you do eat a big meal, your body just can’t process that much with a reduced metabolism and your body converts that into fat. When your metabolism does speed up after you have a large meal, before long that faster metabolism will make you hungry, and those urges can be hard to fight.

Regulating your intake on a tight schedule also regulates your metabolism and you will often eat only what your body needs, you won’t have urges to snack, and your metabolism will often adjust to your intake.

When your intake and metabolism are oscillating, the effects of the exact same quantitative intake can cause your body to store fat that it won’t store on a regulated intake schedule.

I am over weight once again. With me it is and has been a sedentary lifestyle due to rheumatoid arthritis and fibro for ten years and giving up a healthy walk or swim each day. I to must admit I did wrong by living so sedentary. I should have known better because exercise in moderation helps pain.

Anyway, I am in a support group right now called, TOPS…taking off pounds sensibility. To me it has always helped me to be with other men and women who need to lose weight and help one another out. It is a christian weight loss program. Once I get down to my goal weight like Arnold Harris did the name I am aiming for is, KOPS. That is, keeping off pounds sensibly.

Kevin, you may want to eat some fruit in the evening and possibly consider a program like I am in. Heh, there are even 12 step programs for weight loss. I have had such a good time in TOPS. The men and women there are just like me with pretty much the same stories as I read above in this thread. We are to exercise about 30 minuets each day of any kind we like. If that does not work out then we are told to aim for three to four times per week.

(I am so very excited because the later part of next week I am going to order my new laptop computer with Windows Vista and I will try to opine in these threads. It’s so good to be a part of da world ;-)

Bill, I’ve almost never talked about my personal experience of metabolism. I don’t find my personal experience to be all that relevant to the discussion.

I realize my sentence structure may be unclear: I was referring to Kevin D’s comments above when i referenced personal experience. I was saying that while I can see how your commentary on the matter can come off as aggressive, Kevin’s comments relating his personal experience as universal guide are also flawed.

As far as the rest of your comment, I agree with it. I’ve studied this stuff reasonably well, and the survival mechanisms of fat cells (them dividing but not dying, the accumulated release of leptin which drives appetite, the abdominal fat suppression of liplytic hormones) are so powerful that the work for the obese to become non-obese and stay that way is an exponential curve compared to someone who never becomes obese in the first place.

I think you all missed my point. My point was that being able to take 20 pounds off was not any evidence whatsoever that diet “cured” weight problems. It hasn’t “cured” mine, even when it WORKS.

I do think that is relevent to the overall question about obesity. There is something going on that diet and exercise alone cannot address. That much seems obvious to me. Is the situation of the morbidly obese qualitatively or quantitatively different than my situation? I’m not sure we know.